where he dug the queen out of the excavated nest).
A couple of weeks ago, Hamadou, who works on the yard at the house where
we lived, excavated a termite mount in the back yard. This was because,
he explained, otherwise you get snakes, which won't dig but which like
to live in the tunnels the termites construct. The termite mound was
about the size and shape of a week's worth of dirty laundry, maybe a
foot high. He dug it out to a depth of about eighteen inches below
ground level, and left the dirt in a pile by the hole. There was more
to come.
Today he came to the door and showed us the queen. It was a grub two
inches long. He explained that he had dug her out of the dirt left by
the hole, where the termites will busily reconstruct their home. If you
don't wait to find the queen this way, you'll never find it at all, and
the termites will just build another mound a few feet away from the
original location.
The notches on the back of the queen, apparently, are like rings in a
tree, each indicating a year of growth. So this queen was a few years
old. He said they get bigger.
Whatever they do to the ground makes it very hard, he said, and poked at
it where he had broken in again. I poked at it too, and it felt like
concrete. The dog came by and stole a piece the size of a tennis ball
and ate it. Hamadou chased her and laughed. He indicated the larger
termites he had uncovered in the process of digging out the queen, and
said they guard her.
I was pretty pleased with my French, getting this whole explanation with
relative ease. Hamadou is from the northern part of the country, as are
a lot of the people who work as guards apparently, so French may not be
his first language. This seems to make it easier; the much more fluid
and idiomatic French of our coworkers is sometimes difficult to understand.
We have termites in the house too, or something similar. Some of the
wooden furniture has tiny holes with little mounds of sawdust next to them.
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